The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 10

After I had been keeping the records for four months, I was transferred to the City Court, before which civil causes are tried, and was suddenly promoted from the mechanical occupation of writing from dictation to an independent post, which, having regard to my inexperience and my sentiments, made my position difficult. The first stage in which the legal novice was called to a more independent sphere of activity was in connection with divorce proceedings. Obviously regarded as the least important, they were entrusted to the most incapable Rath, Prätorius by name, and under him were left to the tender mercies of unfledged Auscultators, who had to make upon this corpus vile their first experiments in the part of judges—of course, under the nominal responsibility of Herr Prätorius, who nevertheless took no part in their proceedings. By way of indicating this gentleman's character, it was told to us young people that when, in the course of a sitting, he was roused from a light slumber to give his vote, he used to say, "I vote with my colleague Tempelhof"—whereupon it was sometimes necessary to point out to him that Herr Tempelhof was not present.

On one occasion I represented to him my embarrassment at having, though only a few months more than twenty years old, to undertake the attempt at a reconciliation between an agitated couple: a matter crowned, according to my view, with a certain ecclesiastical and moral "nimbus," with which in my state of mind I did not feel able to cope. I found Prätorius in the irritable mood of an old man awakened at an untimely moment, who had besides all the aversion of an old bureaucrat to a young man of birth. He said, with a contemptuous smile, "It is very annoying, Herr Referendarius, when a man can do nothing for himself; I will show you how to do it." I returned with him into the judge's room. The case was one in which the husband wanted a divorce and the wife not. The husband accused her of adultery; the wife, tearful and declamatory, asserted her innocence; and, despite all manner of ill-treatment from the man, wanted to remain with him. Prätorius, with his peculiar clicking lisp, thus addressed the woman: "But, my good woman, don't be so stupid. What good will it do you? When you get home, your husband will give you a jacketing until you can stand no more. Come now, simply say 'yes,' and then you will be quit of the sot." To which the wife, crying hysterically, replied: "I am an honest woman! I will not have that indignity put upon me! I don't want to be divorced!" After manifold retorts and rejoinders in this tone, Prätorius turned to me with the words: "As she will not listen to reason, write as follows, Herr Referendarius," and dictated to me some words which, owing to the deep impression they made upon me, I remember to this day. "Inasmuch as the attempt at reconciliation has been made, and arguments drawn from the sphere of religion and morality have proved fruitless, further proceedings were taken as follows." My chief then rose and said, "Now, you see how it is done, and in future leave me in peace about such things." I accompanied him to the door, and went on with the case. The Divorce Court stage of my career lasted, so far as I can remember, from four to six weeks; a reconciliation case never came before me again. There was a certain necessity for the ordinance respecting proceedings in divorce cases, to which Frederick William IV. was obliged to confine himself after his attempts to introduce a law for the substantial alteration of the Marriage Law had foundered upon the opposition of the Council of State. With regard to this matter it may be mentioned that, as a result of this ordinance, the Attorney-General was first introduced into those provinces in which the old Prussian common law prevailed as defensor matrimonii, and to prevent collusion between the parties.

More inviting was the subsequent stage of petty cases, where the untrained young jurist at least acquired practice in listening to pleadings and examining witnesses, but where more use was made of him as a drudge than was met by the resulting benefit to his instruction. The locality and the procedure partook somewhat of the restless bustle of a railway manager's work. The space in which the leading Rath and the three or four Auscultators sat with their backs to the public was surrounded by a wooden screen, and round about the four-cornered recess formed thereby surged an ever-changing and more or less noisy mob of parties to the suits.

My impression of institutions and persons was not essentially modified when I had been transferred to the Administration. In order to abbreviate the détour to diplomacy, I applied to a Rhenish government, that of Aachen, where the course could be gone through in two years, whereas in the "old" provinces at least three years were required.30

I can well imagine that in making the appointments to the Rhenish Governing Board in 1816 the same procedure was adopted as at the organization of Elsass-Lothringen in 1871. The authorities who had to contribute a portion of their staff would not be likely to respond to the call of state requirements by putting their best foot foremost to accomplish the difficult task of assimilating a newly acquired population, but would have chosen those members of their offices whose departure was desired by their superiors or wished by themselves; in the board were to be found former secretaries of prefectures and other relics of the French administration. The personnel did not all correspond to the ideal which floated unwarrantably enough before my eyes at twenty-one, and still less was this the case with the details of the current business. I recollect that, what with the many differences of opinion between officials and governed, or with internal differences of opinion among each of these two categories, whose polemics for many years considerably swelled the bulk of the records, my habitual impression was, "Well, yes, that is one way of doing it"; and that questions, the decision of which one way or the other was not worth the paper wasted upon them, created a mass of business which a single prefect could have disposed of with the fourth part of the energy bestowed upon them. Nevertheless, except for the subordinate officials, the day's work was slight; as regards heads of departments especially, a mere sinecure.

I quitted Aachen with a very poor opinion of our bureaucracy, in detail and collectively, with the exception of the gifted President, Count Arnim-Boitzenburg. My opinion of the detail became more favorable owing to my next subsequent experience in the government at Potsdam, to which I got transferred in the year 1837; because there, unlike the arrangement in other provinces, the indirect taxes were at the disposal of the government, and it was just these that were important to me if I wanted to make customs-policy the basis of my future.

The members of the board made a better impression upon me than those at Aachen; but yet, taking them as a whole, it was an impression of pigtail and periwig, in which category my youthful presumption also placed the paternal dignified President-in-Chief, von Bassewitz; while the President of the Aachen Government, Count Arnim, wore the generic wig of the state service, it is true, but no intellectual pigtail. When therefore I quitted the service of the State for a country life, I imported into the relations which as a landed proprietor I had with the officials an opinion, which I now see to have been too mean, of the value of our bureaucracy, and perhaps too great an inclination to criticize them. I remember that as substitute provincial president I had to give my verdict on a plan for abolishing the election of those officials; I expressed myself to the effect that the bureaucracy, as it ascended from the provincial president, sank in the general esteem; it had preserved it only in the person of the provincial president, who wore a Janus head, one face turned towards the bureaucracy, the other towards the country.

The tendency to interference in the most various relations of life was, under the paternal government of those days, perhaps greater than now; but the instruments of such interference were less numerous, and, as regards culture and breeding, stood much higher than do some of those of today. The officials of the right worshipful royal Prussian government were honest, well-read and well-bred officials; but their benevolent activity did not always meet with recognition, because from want of local experience they went to pieces on matters of detail, in regard to which the views of the learned citizen at the green table were not always superior to the healthy common-sense criticism of the peasant intelligence. The members of the Governing Boards had in those days multa, not multum, to do; and the lack of higher duties resulted in their not finding a sufficient quantity of important business, and led them in their zeal for duty to go beyond the needs of the governed, into a tendency to over-regulation—in a word, into what the Swiss calls Befehlerle.31 To glance at a comparison with present conditions, it had been hoped that the state authorities would have been relieved of business and of officials by the introduction of the local self-government of today; but, on the contrary, the number of the officials and their load of business have been very considerably increased by correspondence, and friction with the machinery of self-government, from the provincial councillor down to the rural parish administration. Sooner or later the flaw must be reached, and we shall be crushed by the burden of clerkdom, especially in the subordinate bureaucracy.

Moreover, bureaucratic pressure upon private life is intensified by the mode in which self-government works in practice and encroaches more sharply than before on the rural parishes. Formerly the provincial president, who stood in as close relations with the people as with the State, formed the lowest step in the State bureaucracy. Below him were local authorities, who were no doubt subject to control, but not in the same measure as nowadays to the disciplinary powers of the district, or the ministerial, bureaucracy. The rural population enjoys today, by virtue of the measure of self-government conceded to it, an autonomy, not perhaps similar to that which the towns had long ago; but it has received, in the shape of the official commissioner, a chief who is kept in disciplinary check by superior instructions proceeding from the provincial resident, under the threat of penalties, and compelled to burden his fellow-citizens in his district with lists, notifications, and inquisitions as the political hierarchy thinks good. The governed contribuens plebs no longer possess, in the court of the provincial president, that guarantee against blundering encroachment which, at an earlier period was to be found in the circumstance that people resident in the district who became provincial presidents as a rule resolved to remain so in their own districts all their life long, and sympathized with the joys and sorrows of the district. Today the post of provincial president is the lowest step in the ladder of the higher administration, sought after by young "assessors" who have a justifiable ambition to make a career. To obtain it they have more need of ministerial favor than of the goodwill of the local population, and they attempt to win this favor by conspicuous zeal, and by "taking it out of" the official commissioners of the so-called local administration, or by carrying out valueless bureaucratic experiments. Therein lies for the most part the inducement to overburden their subordinates in the local self-government system. Thus self-government means the aggravation of bureaucracy, increase in the number of officials, and of their powers and interference in private life.

It is only human nature to be more keenly sensitive to the thorns than to the roses of every institution, and that the thorns should irritate one against the existing state of things. The old government officials, when they came into direct contact with the governed population, showed themselves to be pedantic, and estranged from the practical working of life by their occupation at the green table; but they left behind them the impression of toiling honesty and conscientiously for justice. The same thing cannot be assumed in all their degrees of the wheels in the machine of the self-government of today in those country districts where the parties stand in acute opposition to each other; goodwill towards political friends, frame of mind as regards opponents, readily become a hindrance to the impartial maintenance of institutions. According to my experiences in earlier and more recent times, I should, for the rest, not like to allow impartiality, when comparing judicial and administrative decisions, to the former alone, not at least in every instance. On the contrary, I have preserved an impression that judges of small local courts succumb more easily to strong party influences than do administrative officials; nor need we invent any psychological reason for the fact that, given equal culture, the latter should a priori be considered less just and conscientious in their official decisions than the former. But I certainly do assume that official decisions do not gain in honesty and moderation by being arrived at collectively; for apart from the fact that, in the case of voting by majority, arithmetic and chance take the place of logical reasoning, that feeling of personal responsibility, in which lies the essential guarantee for the conscientiousness of the decision, is lost directly it comes about by means of anonymous majorities.

The course of business in the two boards of Potsdam and Aachen was not very encouraging for my ambition. I found the business assigned to me petty and tedious, and my labors in the department of suits arising from the grist tax and from the compulsory contribution to the building of the embankment at Rotzis, near Wusterhausen, have left behind in me no sentimental regrets for my sphere of work in those days. Renouncing the ambition for an official career, I readily complied with the wishes of my parents by taking up the humdrum management of our Pomeranian estates. I had made up my mind to live and die in the country, after attaining successes in agriculture—perhaps in war also, if war should come. So far as my country life left me any ambition at all, it was that of a lieutenant in the Landwehr.

The impressions that I had received in my childhood were little adapted to make a squire of me. In Plamann's educational establishment, conducted on the systems of Pestalozzi and Jahn, the "von" before my name was a disadvantage, so far as my childish comfort was concerned, in my intercourse with my fellow-pupils and my teachers. Even at the high school at the Grey Friars I had to suffer, as regards individual teachers, from that hatred of nobility which had clung to the greater part of the educated bourgeoisie as a reminiscence of the days before 1806. But even the aggressive tendency which occasionally appeared in bourgeois circles never gave me any inducement to advance in the opposite direction. My father was free from aristocratic prejudices, and his inward sense of equality had been modified, if at all, by his youthful impressions as an officer, but in no way by any over-estimate of inherited rank. My mother was the daughter of Mencken, Privy Councillor to Frederick the Great, Frederick William II., and Frederick William III., who sprang from a family of Leipzig professors, and was accounted in those days a Liberal. The later generations of the Menckens—those immediately preceding me—had found their way to Prussia in the Foreign Office and about the Court. Baron von Stein has quoted my grandfather Mencken as an honest, strongly Liberal official. Under these circumstances, the views which I imbibed with my mother's milk were Liberal rather than reactionary; and, if my mother had lived to see my ministerial activity, she would scarcely have been in accord with its direction, even though she would have experienced great joy in the external results of my official career. She had grown up in bureaucratic and court circles; Frederick William IV. spoke of her as "Mienchen," in memory of childish games. I can therefore declare it an unjust estimate of my views in my younger years, when "the prejudices of my rank" are thrown in my teeth and it is maintained that a recollection of the privileges of the nobility has been the starting-point of my domestic policy.

Moreover, the unlimited authority of the old Prussian monarchy was not, and is not, the final word of my convictions. As to that, to be sure, this authority of the monarch constitutionally existed in the first United Diet, but accompanied by the wish and anticipation that the unlimited power of the King, without being overturned, might fix the measure of its own limitation. Absolutism primarily demands impartiality, honesty, devotion to duty, energy, and inward humility in the ruler. These may be present, and yet male and female favorites (in the best case the lawful wife), the monarch's own vanity and susceptibility to flattery, will nevertheless diminish the fruits of his good intentions, inasmuch as the monarch is not omniscient and cannot have an equal understanding of all branches of his office. As early as 1847 I was in favor of an effort to secure the possibility of public criticism of the government in parliament and in the press, in order to shelter the monarch from the danger of having blinkers put on him by women, courtiers, sycophants, and visionaries, hindering him from taking a broad view of his duties as monarch, or from avoiding and correcting his mistakes. This conviction of mine became all the more deeply impressed upon me in proportion as I became better acquainted with Court circles, and had to defend the interest of the State from their influences and also from the opposition of a departmental patriotism. The interests of the State alone have guided me, and it has been a calumny when publicists, even well-meaning, have accused me of having ever advocated an aristocratic system. I have never regarded birth as a substitute for want of ability; whenever I have come forward on behalf of landed property, it has not been in the interests of proprietors of my own class, but because I see in the decline of agriculture one of the greatest dangers to our permanence as a State. The ideal that has always floated before me has been a monarchy which should be so far controlled by an independent national representation—according to my notion, representing classes or callings—that monarch or parliament would not be able to alter the existing statutory position before the law separately but only communi consensus with publicity, and public criticism, by press and Diet, of all political proceedings.

Whoever has the conviction that uncontrolled Absolutism, as it was first brought upon the stage by Louis XIV., was the most fitting form of government for German subjects, must lose it after making a special study in the history of Courts, and such critical observations as I was enabled to institute at the court of Frederick William IV. (whom personally I loved and revered) in Manteuffel's days. The King was a religious absolutist with a divine vocation, and the ministers after Brandenburg were content as a rule if they were covered by the royal signature even when they could not have personally answered for the contents of what was signed. I remember that on one occasion a high Court official of absolutist opinions, on hearing of the news of the royalist rising at Neuchâtel, observed, with some confusion, in the presence of myself and several of his colleagues: "That is a royalism of which nowadays one has to go very far from Court to get experience." Yet, as a rule, sarcasm was not a habit of this old gentleman.

Observations which I made in the country as to the venality and chicanery of the "district sergeants" and other subordinate officials, and petty conflicts which I had with the government in Stettin as deputy of the "Circle" and deputy for the provincial president, increased my aversion to the rule of the bureaucracy. I may mention one of these conflicts. While I was representing the President, then on leave, I received an order from the government to compel the patron of Külz, that was myself, to undertake certain burdens. I put the order aside, meaning to give it to the president on his return, was repeatedly worried about it, and fined a thaler, to be forwarded through the post. I now drew up a statement, in which I figured as having appeared, first of all as representative of the Landrath, and secondly as patron of Külz. The party cited made the prescribed representations to himself in his capacity as No. 1, and then proceeded in his capacity of No. 2 to set forth the ground on which he had to decline the application; after which the statement was approved and subscribed by him in his double capacity. The government understood a joke, and ordered the fine to be refunded. In other cases, things resulted in less pleasant heckling. I had a critical disposition, and was consequently liberal, in the sense in which the word was then used among landed proprietors to imply discontent with the bureaucracy, the majority of whom on their side were men more liberal than myself, though in another sense.

I again slipped off the rails of my parliamentary liberal tendencies, with regard to which I found little understanding or sympathy in Pomerania, but which in Schönhausen met with the acquiescence of men in my own district, like Count Wartensleben of Karow, Schierstädt-Dahlen, and others (the same men of whom some were among the party of Church patrons in the New Era subsequently condemned). This was the result of the style, to me unsympathetic, in which the opposition was conducted in the first United Diet, to which I was summoned, only for the last six weeks of the session, as substitute for Deputy von Brauchitsch, who was laid up with illness. The speeches of the East Prussians, Saucken-Tarputschen and Alfred Auerswald, the sentimentality of Beckerath, the Gallo-Rhenish liberalism of Heydt and Mevissen, and the boisterous violence of Vincke's speeches, disgusted me; and even at this date when I read the proceedings they give me the impression of imported phrases made to pattern. I felt that the King was on the right track, and could claim to be allowed time, and not be hurried in his development.

I came into conflict with the Opposition the first time I made a longer speech than usual, on May 17, 1847, when I combatted the legend that the Prussians had gone to war in 1813 to get a constitution, and gave free expression to my natural indignation at the idea that foreign domination was in itself no adequate reason for fighting.32 It appeared to me undignified that the nation, as a set-off to its having freed itself, should hand in to the King an account payable in the paragraphs of a constitution. My performance produced a storm. I remained in the tribune turning over the leaves of a newspaper which lay there, and then, when the commotion had subsided, I finished my speech.

At the Court festivities, which took place during the session of the United Diet, I was avoided in a marked manner both by the King and the Princess of Prussia, though for different reasons: by the latter because I was neither Liberal nor popular; by the former for a reason which only became clear to me later. When, on the reception of the deputies, he avoided speaking to me—when, in the Court circle, after speaking to every one in turn, he broke off immediately he came to me, turned his back, or strolled away across the room—I considered myself justified in supposing that my attitude as a Royalist Hotspur had exceeded the limits which the King had fixed for himself. Only some months later, when I reached Venice on my honeymoon, did I discover that this explanation was incorrect. The King, who had recognized me in the theatre, commanded me on the following day to an audience and to dinner; and so unexpected was this to me that my light travelling luggage and the incapacity of the local tailor did not admit of my appearing in correct costume. My reception was so kindly, and the conversation, even on political subjects, of such a nature as to enable me to infer that my attitude in the Diet met with his encouraging approval. The King commanded me to call upon him in the course of the winter, and I did so. Both on this occasion at smaller dinners at the palace I became persuaded that I stood high in the favor of both the King and the Queen, and that the former, in avoiding speaking to me in public, at the time of the session of the Diet, did not mean to criticize my political conduct, but at the time did not want to let others see his approval of me.